Totonac Cultural Revitalization: An Alternative to the Zapatistas

By Albert L. Wahrhaftig, Sonoma State University and Bruce (Pacho) Lane, Rochester Institute of
Technology

Annual Meeting of the Western Social Science Association, American Indian Studies Section, Oakland,
California. April 29, 1995

Abstract

Little known, a significant movement of cultural revitalization among the
Totonac Indians of Huehuetla in the state of Puebla, Mexico, celebrated its
fifth anniversary last year. The OIT (Independent Totonac Organization),
supported on the one hand by alliance with the liberal PRD (Party of the
Democratic Revolution) and on the other by local clergy committed to
teologia india (a pan-American movement to "Indianize" Catholic liturgy) has
nonviolently seized control of the municipal government, schools, and church.
Differences in tactics between the OIT and the Zapatista National Liberation
Army in Chiapas will be discussed.

The abrupt and surprising emergence of the Zapatista National Liberation
Army in Chiapas captured international attention and focused debate on the
poverty and oppression of Mexico's rural and indigenous poor. The celebrity of
the Zapatistas, however, has also detracted attention from significant
indigenous movements elsewhere in Mexico. One development which has so far
passed un-noticed is the emergence of an Independent Totonac Organization (OIT)
among the highland Totonacs in the Sierra Norte of the state of Puebla, a
revitalistic movement which contrasts sharply in its aims and its tactics with
the EZNL.

This is a first and very preliminary report on the OIT among the Totonacs and
is based on observations which are, at this point, admittedly sketchy, for
the OIT was a "surprise" which greeted the authors who had traveled to Totonac
country with an entirely different project in mind.

Film maker Pacho Lane has worked among the Totonac since 1969 completing two
films in the municipality of Huehuetla. The first, The Tree of Life, (Lane
1976) deals with the ritual of the voladores, (1) (2) a core ceremony in the
ritual cycle of the highlands and a major symbol of Totonac identity but
whichnevertheless was not performed in the years following 1972. The second,
The Tree of Knowledge (Lane 1981) contrasts the Totonac Dance of the Huehues
with the rituals and the ceremonies of the national public school, the two taken
together constituting a dialogue between constituencies with opposing views
about assimilation. In 1984, Lane and Wahrhaftig joined forces with the
intention of making a third film about an adolescent Totonac boy dealing with
the contradictory pressures to remain Indian and to turn mestizo. The filming
project took them to Huehuetla twice in that year and then was suspended until
two short trips in 1993 and 1994 when, returning to Huehuetla to resume work on
this film, the authors discovered the OIT. Before proceeding to the OIT, some
background on Huehuetla is in order.

In the 1960's, Huehuetla was typical of the marginal areas in which enclaves of
traditional Indians exist in Mexico. Isolated in the mountainous Sierra Norte of
the State of Puebla, the municipality was nine hours by foot path from the
nearest vehicular road.(3) According to the 1970 census1, there were some 53,000
Totonac speakers in the State of Puebla, over 7,000 of whom (tht is, 80% of the
municipal population) lived in the municipality of Huehuetla (Barbosa Cano 1980:
25, 63, and apendice 2, cuadro #13). The Totonac. a predominantly monolingual
and virtually uneducated population, were largely subsistence farmers (4) living
dispersed along mountain trails. Their culture, as depicted in Lane's two films,
was largely integrated by a complex calendrical round of danzas performed within
a typical Mesoamerican cargo system by societies of devotees. The town center
and its political and economic institutions was dominated by a core of locally
powerful mestizos. (5)(6)

By 1985, much had changed. Huehueta was reachable by road. The educational
system was expanding and Totonacs were entering schools whose administrators
and teachers were, as a matter of explicit policy, dedicated to making Totonacs
ashamed to speak their own language and wear native clothes as a means of
encouraging them to enter the national culture. Subsistence agriculture had
given way to the cultivation of coffee as a cash crop, a change largely
attributable to the successful efforts of young extension agronomists who, in
this post-Tlateloco era, were also dedicated to organizing the Indians into the
PST, the Socialist Workers Party (Democracy Backgrounder 1995:np).

2 The previously rich ceremonial activity was abandoned, and there is much to
suggest that alcoholism and familial dysfunction intensified. When we visited
Huehuetla in 1984 in the company of a young Totonac who had settled in the State
of Veracruz and was living as a mestizo there, he was greeted by former
schoolmates who were envious of his transition and would have done the same
had they not been intimidated by their lack of Spanish and ability to find their
way in the national society. Given this trajectory, there was no reason to
expect anything other than continuing deculturation and intensifying domination
of Indians by mestizos.

Accordingly, the changes we witnessed during brief visits in 1993 and 1994
were a complete surprise. In front of the Catholic church, a new palo volador
had been erected. (7) The ceremony had been revived3 and, in fact, the elements
of it were now being taught in the primary school.

The church was transformed. By 1984 a 15 foot high replica of the main
pyramid at El Tajin, reputed to be the "birthplace" of the Totonacs, had been
erected over the altar atop a base which served as a reliquary for Totonac
ceremonial objects, (8) and the images of Jesus and the Saints had all been
"Totonacized" by providing them with the flutes, drums, and adornments used in
Totonac danzas, (9) (10) (11) (12) By 1985 the altar base was covered with a
frieze of pre-Hispanic symbols (13) and the altar was surmounted by a mural
conflating Christ, the Cross, the Tree of Life, and the palo volador bracketed
by corn gods.(14) (15) (16) The mass was said in Totonac by a Nahuatl-speaking
priest and nuns who had learned Totonac. (17)

Nearby, a building occupied by the OIT housed a co-op store, tortilleria,
administrative office, and herbarium. (18( Most surprising of all, the entire
corps of elected municipal officials were now Totonacs and the office of the
municipal president displayed two bilingual posters (19) exhorting Totonacs to
maintain their language, respect the traditions of their elders, participate in
traditional cargos, utilize indigenous medicines, and so forth.

Given that our fieldwork was in the months preceding the Mexican presidential
elections, it was reasonable to suppose that Cuahtemoc Cardenes's liberal PRD
was underwriting organizations such as this in order to consolidate its strength
in areas where the ruling PRI was relatively inattentive. Indeed, during our
1983 visit, when both the priest and the president of the OIT were out of town,
I supposed that Huehuetla was a local branch of a regional organization directed
from an urban center - Jalapa, perhaps, or Papantla.

In 1984, the municipal president and the president of the OIT(20) stated firmly
that independent meant just that, and that although they did receive support
from the PRD they had a written pact defining the OIT as independent but allied
and, further, that Huehuetla is the center where OIT originated and from which
it is spreading to neighboring municipalities, in three of which the OIT
expected to capture the municipal government in the next round of elections.

These elected officials were not the semi-assimilated marginal men who so often
show up in these circumstances. They were traditionally oriented country folk.
The comandante of the municipal police, for example, had been consecrated as a
volador.

In a written program produced in connection with the celebration of its fifth
anniversary, the OIT, which claims 4,000 members, proposed broad goals
including self-determination and autonomy, enhancement of culture, health and
nutrition, development of organic and sustainable agriculture, democratization
of government through a People's General Council, and the restoration of
traditional religion and customs (Organizaci97n Independiente Totonaca 1994).
Between the activities of the OIT and the church, change was manifest in every
sector of municipal life.

Vehicular roads were being extended into the Indian peripheries (21) and a
program of rural electrification was well under way.

4
Plans were afoot to revise several traditional danzas with subsidy from the
church and the municipal government, and new ritual artifacts were being
produced. (22) (23) (24)

The OIT and the Totonac population generally had flexed political muscles on
more than one occasion. Surmounting the town is a large extension facility run
byINI, the National Indigenous Institute, the director of which was firmly
allied with the nationally dominant PRI and was providing services only to
political cronies. When persuasion failed, 2500 Totonacs marched on the INI
center and occupied its headquarters, leaving the director isolated in his
office, phoning Mexico City for reinforcements to save the Indian Institute
from the Indians! INI responded by sending an investigative team and, in the
kind of instance that is rare in Mexico, ruled that the director had acted out
of favoritism and replaced him that very night with one sympathetic to the
Totonac community.

When the national school system proved unable to transcend its assimilative
prejudices, the OIT secured a startup loan from the municipal treasury and
established its own bilingual school and bilingual texts. (25)In the country
ceremonial sodalities continued their rites at rural altars,(26) but brought
these into relationship with the church in the town center.
(27)

As well as refurbishing traditional institutions, Totonacs developed new ones.
Civic festivals with a Queen representing the local product are common in the
Sierra, and Huehuetla, like other municipalities, annually elected a Queen of
Coffee, predictably a maiden form the mestizo elite. To this, the
Totonac-dominated municipal government has added a Queen of the Ribbons (28)
(the list97nes, traditionally wrapped into the braids of Totonac girls) and a
parade and disco celebration honoring the parity of the co-Queens.5 (29)Needless
to say, the mestizos, bereft of power, are far from happy about their situation.
>From their point of view, Indians are being cynically manipulated by the Church
and to the detriment of all.6. "The priests have destroyed the town," said one.
"They are snakes and traitors. ...As a Mexican patriot and Catholic, I hate
them." Beyond such talk, they manoeuver where possible to undermine the growing
power of the OIT, managing, for example, to persuade the Secretariat of Public
Education to withdraw accreditation from the OIT's bilingual school ( which
responded by reestablishing itself as an "open preparatory school" accredited
through the Autonomous University of Puebla.

The mestizo critique does bring up the question whether the OIT is the
creation of manipulative outsiders or is autochthonous. That it is at least in
part a product of a branch of liberation theology called teologia india is
certain. Priests associated with teologia india claim that the OIT is the
outgrowth of pastoral work which has proceeded since the beginning of the 1980s
under a Pastoral Plan for the Sierra Norte.7. Included in this plan was a
spiritual retreat within the ruins of Tajin to explore Indian tradition as
seed of the Word, that is, manifestations of the same religiosity which has
inspired the Roman Christian tradition. Among related activities were a
gathering of danza captains in the Huehuetla mission house in 1990 to discover
in the ritual of the danza "God's revelation as present in the medium of the
Totonac people" (Primer Encuentro 1991:234-236). Adding some credence to the
theory of pastoral manipulation was the response of the President of the OIT
when asked about the meaning of the symbols graved on the altar. He said th at
the priest took them from a copy of a codex he has and he hasn't explained them
yet.

It is predictable that mestizos who have traditionally thought of Indian as a
servile and genetically inferior lot would fail to credit them with any hand in
theirown development, however, the case is that a new generation of Totonacs
are crucial to the changes that have taken place. If anything, it is they who
manipulate the resources of the church on one side and the PRD on the other.
The most conspicuous example is the directress of the OIT bilingual school.
(30)

One of the four Totonacs who were the first to graduate from secondary
school, she went on to earn her law degree at the Autonomous University of
Puebla with a thesis which examined the legislation protecting Indian right in
the Sierra stemming from the 1991 amendment of the Mexican Constitution (Tirado
Evangelio 1994). Her analysis provided the basis for educating Totonacs
to their rights to local enfranchisement. As the priest said about this, "the
caciques didn't know the law. All they knew about was money, drinking, and
buying votes. When the Totonac confronted them with the law, they didn't know
what to do." Thus, Totonacs took over the municipal government. As the priest
said on another occasion, "teologia india went further than we thought it
would."

Stavenhagen in an article on "The Indian Resurgence in Mexico" (1944:80)
describes such situations well:

....the emerging Indian intelligentsia will play a crucial role, aided by
pro-Indian advocates from the social sciences, the progressive elements of the
Catholic church and a number of political organizations. In earlier years, the
Indian intelligentsia would have been siphoned off and assimilated into the
dominant society. While this still happens, indigenous professional people..are
increasingly...displacing the more traditional kind of community authority which
has played such a fundamental role in the period of passive resistance and
retrenchment....

If the revitalization of Totonac culture is as thoroughgoing as our
preliminary research seems to indicate, and if it is indeed a movement of their
own doing, how did they get so far so fast? That question awaits further
research, but two factors seem likely. One is that there has been considerable
continuity of leadership among the Totonac. Persons who were Captains of ritual
organizations (31) became involved in socialist politics at the hands of
agricultural extension workers and thereby learned grassroots organizing skills
(an oral history of this period would be well worthwhile) which were waiting to
connect with the assistance offered by the church and the PRD8.. The other
is that, unlike the ladinos of Chiapas, a wealthy, politically powerful, and
deeply entrenched cadre of landowners, the mestizos of Huehuetla arrived only
in the 19th century, do not own large tracts of land, are not wealthy, and can
wield little in the way of either political clout or economic sanctions.
Anderson (1994) rightly notes that "The Zapatistas' leftist rhetoric should
not be the prism through which all indigenous activism is evaluated....At the
most fundamental level, the indigenous agenda is one of political and economic
empowerment and, to a certain degree, of cultural sovereignty." The Totonac
OIT and the Chiapas EZLN are poles apart. Where the EZLN is militaristic, the OIT
is pacifistic. Where the EZLN is polemical and aims its efforts at the reform
ofMexican society in general, the interests of the OIT are low key and primarily
local.

Where the EZLN seems to welcome an expansion of its efforts, with branches
cropping up elsewhere in Mexico and supporters throughout the world, the OIT
seems to operate on the presumption that if persons from other municipalities
and even other indigenous groups care to study and replicate what has been
accomplished in Huehuetla, they are welcome, but at most a confederacy of
autonomous communities is all they care to see. Where the EZLN has depended
since its first day of public emergence on international communication of its
aims and priorities as a means of escalating the costs of exterminating, the
OIT has deliberately maintained a low profile. So far as I know, our work will
be its first exposure outside the boundaries of Huehuetla.

2.One of our principal informants, co-captain of the Voladores became an
activist in the party, traveling to regional and national conferences and
meetings.

3. The palo volador was rigged with inadequate ropes which parted causing one
volador to fall to his death during the ceremony. The ceremony is therefore
once again in suspension.

4.How these developments were financed remains to be researched.

5.The 1994 celebration was a study in discourse commencing with a live trio
playing huastecas, the region's traditional musical form to cheers of "Viva la
huasteca" extorted in Spanish by the master of ceremonies and then segueing
into ear splitting disco replete with amplification through huge speakers and
flashing laser-like lights. Attended only, it appeared, by both ethnic Queens,
their consorts, the municipal president, and persons directly tied to the
OIT-municipal government, the event, intended to celebrate the unity of Indians
and mestizos within one community was conspicuously boycotted by the latter.